When word broke that the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox had met with Pete Alonso at the Winter Meetings before he signed with the Baltimore Orioles, I offered up my reaction here. The short version? No reason not to meet, it probably wasn’t serious, and it probably served everyone’s interests.
Other folks had a different reaction, and it’s one we’ve heard many times before when reporting indicates the Cubs were involved/interested/etc. with respect to a free agent they didn’t ultimately sign: It’s all for show! It’s a trick to make fans think they are trying when they’re not!
This perspective, while understandable at a gut level, has simply never made sense to me. Are there really fans out there buying more tickets because the Cubs failed to sign a player? How does it help the Cubs to constantly put out a message that they failed to accomplish something?
That isn’t to say leaks don’t sometimes originate with the team for other messaging/leverage/pressure purposes, but I don’t think the front office is wasting time taking meetings or negotiating with agents all in the hopes that it will leak and trick the fans.
To that end, Chris Cotillo, who covers the Boston Red Sox, recently tweeted something about rumor season that I thought was so perfectly said, and I wanted to share the whole thing (it won’t embed fully). It felt particularly apropos as it was the Red Sox who’d also met with Alonso, and many of their fans had a similar reaction to the one I discussed above.
Just replace the references to the Red Sox with references to the Cubs, and it works. From Cotillo:
“Worth noting: While it’s extremely fair to criticize the Red Sox for not closing deals/not being as aggressive as they should have been in many cases dating back to 2019 (and we have, and we will), the ‘interest kings’ label should come with a couple caveats.
1) This time of year, every team checks in on every player from guys they really want to guys who are fallbacks to guys who they’re just posturing with by checking in on. The Red Sox will be ‘in on’ or ‘interested in’ north of 100 players this winter and land a small fraction, obviously. In a perfect world, all of us who cover them would be way more specific (we should be) on the level of interest and try hard to do so but ultimately from the source level, ‘in’ or ‘interested’ is usually about all you can get FO types/agents/players/scouts to cop to.
2) The Red Sox have a bigger beat so more names are going to be linked to them because there are more media members asking specifically about certain players than there would be in other markets. There’s also the element, on the national level, of agents/players making sure a ‘big-market’ name like Boston is out there in order to posture. It’s never a coincidence when you see two divisional teams surface as ‘in’ or ‘fits,’ either.
TLDR (why would you?): Every team is in on a massive range of players who fit them. The Red Sox should be criticized for not closing deals/spending when they don’t but not for showing interest in the # that they do, which is just the norm for MLB”
Spot on. Add to it the fact that, in my view, the Cubs weren’t even actually “in” on Pete Alonso, however generously you might want to define “in,” and that’s just another layer to how it’s probably silly to think all these reports are about tricking the fans.
Also remember what Jed Hoyer has said about so many reports that get out there: they are often purely about some party trying to get an advantage in some kind of possible negotiation, and you can’t always know the chain that connects the report to the facts. They get leaked for a reason. That doesn’t mean the reports aren’t true, it just means someone wants it out there. And the Cubs, like the Red Sox, are going to be used in that fashion a whole lot more often than, say, the White Sox.
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